Archive for the ‘empire’ Category

Many have tried to say something on this subject, but their knowledge of Deep History was superficial, and Political Correctness prevented them to think in full. They didn’t do as good a job as the British historian Edward Gibbon, in his “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire”, published 241 years ago, by an extremely long shot. Gibbon understood the importance of system of thoughts. To understand history, one had to understand the importance of system of moods. Submissive mentalities such asConfucianism and Islamism dug their own graves. All too many success authors recently, did the same, by not understanding by not admitting that mindsets and metaphysics rule civilizations.

Why have Western Civilization and China not collapsed? Well, China was both very incompetent and very lucky. Incompetent, in no small part, because it was intellectually isolated (not anymore!)

Western Civilization was smarter than China, that’s the non PC revelation which nobody wants to draw: non-collapse is all about intelligence. In great part because, Europe, the labyrinthine extremity of Eurasia, is less isolated than China: Europe is smack dab in the Middle Earth. Thus Europe had the opportunity to learn much more history than China, isolated by a whole array of giant mountain ranges and deserts. Those societies which learned history better did better. For example, Europe learned in various ways why its ancestors, the Sumerian cities, Egypt, Babylon, Tyr, flooded, dried up, became unrecognizable after invasions, degenerated into quasi-oblivion, were completely annihilated (Hittites, Phrygia, Assyria, Tyr, Carthage), or became irrelevant (Eastern Roman empire, and all parts of the Roman empire conquered by the Islamists and not wrestled back).

This continual learning was applied live, as events unfolded, by the master leaders. Alexander had a deep appreciation of the higher principles which made a highest civilization tick: he was tolerant and forgiving, qualities that Julius Caesar, who had studied Alexander’s life extensively, copied to excess! Julian would also sin in the same exact superior way. Clovis didn’t study the Greeks to the extent Caesar and Julian had, yet he expressed his determination to use force to rewrite the fundamentals of Christianism, upside down (keep the good, throw away the bad!) Charlemagne took himself for a reincarnation of King David, and operated accordingly. Hence the Romans, when they took control of Hellas were careful not to annihilate their cultural ancestors and superiors, the Greeks. Instead, they just put their foot on them, and the Greeks despised them back (until they regained control, 800 years later).

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There Is Just One Master REASON FOR THE COLLAPSE OF THE ROMAN STATE: OLIGARCHY!

And the dementia it both incarnates, and brings forth. More than 200 reasons have been evoked to explain the collapse of the Roman State. I have basically just one, but it’s a master reason which, modulo long, devious logical chains and happenstance, imply the other 200 reasons. That master reason made the Roman State completely senile. And we are repeating it now, by letting just a few do all the thinking, supposing they can think (and not just follow a public opinion which has itself been informed by plutocratic media), and having just a few do all the ordering around.

The senile, superstitious empire, and its well-meaning, evil leaders, and founding church fathers, was wiped out, and replaced by the frankly philosophically brutal Franks. However, as we will see, similarly to the Yuans, or the Romans of the morbid Republic, or the Romans of the late empire, by the Ninth Century, the Franks lost track of whom the Barbarians to be fought were. They forgot that smashing Barbarians was number one top priority.

Just like now.

And the reason for forgetting the evil of Barbarians is that we are led by an oligarchy who know all too well it’s evil (Bill Clinton surprised me by admitting that said oligarchy was nothing if it didn’t do good, at the Kohl funeral in the European Parliament; I guess he was burying himself alive? I noticed the absence of Obama, by the way…) Oligarchies are always anxious to entertain Barbarians even more abominable than it is. So that they shine, and are excused, relatively speaking.

We are indeed going through a similar process right now. I watched ex-Kanzler Helmut Kohl funeral ceremony at the European Parliament in Strasbourg, France. Kohl unified Germany, held hands with the French president and consented to the French idea of the common currency (“Euro”). A great European, who had learned his fundamental lesson among the ruins of the 1000 Year Fascist-Racist Nationalist-Socialist Reich, to which the French Republic had declared war, six years prior.

Superficially it was a great Franco-German European get-together. What I saw was an assembly of potentates, some notoriously corrupt, kissy kissy with each other. Kanzlerin Merkel and French President Macron talked well. However: Words are empty at best, full of poison, at worst, when thought by only a few, they feed too much power in too few hands.

Some will object. They will say the obvious, thinking they are very smart when charging windmills. They will smirk, not knowing their prove the point they want to deride.

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“REPRESENTATIVE” DEMOCRACY IS NOT DEMOCRACY:

One guy in Strasbourg was Russian Prime Minster Medvedev. He is apparently nearly as wealthy as Bill Clinton. Not bad for a guy who was only always in government jobs. Even when they are not wealthy in properties, those oligarchs who have all the power, are wealthy in outrageous power, and we don’t have the means to talk back (several major media in the USA and the UK ban me, for example, as they are seemingly terrified that their readers would read me in a comment… And then realize I am more free, better informed, and all together more interesting).

Representative “democracy” is all about a few elected individuals taking all the decisions. Right. That’s exactly how and why Rome went down. Accepting the Earthly rule of just a few individuals is accepting the rule of a few minds, unexamined. It is accepting the rule of idiocy. The pure Republic was rather a direct democracy; the impure Republic which Augustus set-up was rather a fascist dictatorship. The pure Republic established the empire, and dreamed to extend over the whole planet! It could, and would, have done it, had it found a way to preserve direct democracy, globally. That was, on paper, easy: to conquer the world, Rome just had to globalize the anti-plutocracy mindset! That would have required to refurbish the absolute legal limit on wealth, and also to end slavery (the Franks would do the latter; absolute limit on wealth was less crucial with the Franks because of fair inheritance laws).

Rome all the way to India, China, reaching the Pacific? It didn’t happen because Roman direct democracy collapsed in a plutocratic crisis.

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Notice that, most the Western Mediterranean, is divided between the Carthaginian empire and the Marseilles empire. Rome is still tiny. The logical thing to do was for Alexander to conquer all of Arabia (the south had agriculture). He intended to do just that, before taking care of Rome and Carthage (not Marseilles, or Magna Grecia in south Italy, both of which were Greek). However Alexander died at 32, while preparing the mixed sea-land invasion of Arabia. Also notice the hole in the middle, uncolored in purple: this represents Athens and her allies, which Alexander did not force to submit. The fiend Antipater, older than Alexander by half a century did, though, after he probably had the Alexander poisoned! The real Game of Throne is so complex, we don’t know yet where it started, nor how it will end…

ALEXANDER, HALF CIVILIZED, HALF GENIUS, CUT SHORT:

Conquering the was tried by Alexander the Great first, but his Greek and Macedonian army longed for home, and found that India was much more powerful militarily than expected. Indians could, and were defeated, but clearly the resources were too stretched out. On his way back, Alexander, infuriated with his men, led the army through the terrible, absolute deserts of Southern Iran, suffering enormous losses. Back in Babylon, Alexander apparently decided to get more organized, conquering first all of Arabia. Then he would turn to the west, and take care of Carthage and Rome.

Then Alexander listened to his mom, the redoubtable Olympia, a royal from a kingdom west of Macedonia, whom his father Philippe had divorced to marry a youngster with whom he had an infant son. Alexander didn’t have to kill his father himself, the chief of the security detail did , and before you know it, Alexander was heading east at the head of the army his father had prepared to deal with Persia’s Achaemenid plutocracy. Greek valor, Macedonian horse, and Alexander’s military genius did the rest. In a matter of years, Alexander had created a hybrid empire with the locals. The elites would talk Greek for centuries, from Central Asia to India.

Olympia wrote to Alexander that Antipater, the most important general of Philippe, was plotting against him. Alexander ordered Antipater to come to Babylon, from Greece. Antipater refused. Next thing, Alexander is dying mysteriously. His closest helper was Antipater’s youngest son. Many (including myself) feel that it is likely that Alexander was poisoned under Antipater’s orders.

Antipater then went to destroy Athens’ direct democracy (everybody debate and vote on all important decisions), replacing it by a plutocracy (only those who are rich enough vote, and it’s to approve what the bosses have determined is to be done).

Notice that Alexander had left Athenian direct democracy alone (and Athens had not rebelled against Alexander, but did, against Antipater).

This is the problem with monarchy, or oligarchy: only a few take the decisions. If those few are excellent and not in error, it works great. But a few minds can’t get it right all the time, however smart.

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HOW THE RENOVATED ROMAN EMPIRE DISINTEGRATED:

An example of this ineptitude of monarchy, or oligarchy, with only a few minds thinking, is provided by Charlemagne. Charlemagne had pretty much a no-fault reign (however his gift of a large estate to the Pope would give the fascist theocrats a power base, for many centuries to come, enabling them to devastate much of Europe with their ludicrous superstition).

However, when advanced in years, Charlemagne saw the first Viking raids. He didn’t know what to do. Neither did his successors, his son and grandsons. Worse: his grandsons fought each other for control (of pieces) of the empire. That was ridiculous, all the more as Charlemagne had a potential Navy, and certainly expertise, from the Venetian Republic, a subsidiary, “march” state.

The Franks should have known what to do with the Viking raiders: after all, the Franks themselves started their career, so to speak, raiding up rivers in Hispania and Gallia, more than five centuries before the Viking imitated them!

What Charlemagne would have done, had he been a young man, and had he thought correctly, was to set-up a Navy, and go to colonize the Scandinavians. Instead, the Vikings made hundreds of major raids, ravaging about a third of “Renovated Roman Empire” before they were finally subdued, through a combination of force and civilizational persuasion.

Notice that the Franco-Romans, when they went on to (re)conquer Britannia, two centuries later, put an end to the Viking kingdoms there. William the Conqueror made his military force irresistible, by advancing democracy in England (the Franks outlawed slavery, and established a sort of monarchy-of-the-people).

By the Eleventh Century, the Franks knew all too well that wild Vikings had to be subdued. But, in 800 CE, they didn’t take the Viking seriously. And then the Viking started first by mostly raiding rich churches, that didn’t bother the half-Pagan Franks too much: the Franks liked to use the Roman Catholic churches as libraries and secular schools, but they weren’t feeling the pain of churches’ treasures being carted away… By 888 CE, when the emperor was deposed for paying the Barbarians, that mood had changed!

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NINTH CENTURY & GREEK LESSONS ARE MOST INSTRUCTIVE TODAY:

Some will scoff: why should they care about all these Greeks, Romans, Franks, Viking and Renovated Romans?

Because we are encountering the same sort of situation today.

The Renovated Roman Empire (“Carolingians as conventional historians have it) had to search, attack and destroy Scandinavian power, the “Fair” (Norway) and “Dark” (Denmark) Vikings. The Vikings had the same ideology: basically they saw easy pickings among the “Renovated Romans”, the world’s richest empire. Similarly the refugees nowadays see easy pickings in Europe. Just show up, get welfare.

A refugee from the wastes out there, if she can sneak into France, say on a tourist visa, can have a child, for free: the French state will pay for everything. Whereas a French citizen from overseas (there are more than three millions) will go to France, have a child, and pay full fare.

Fine, some will say. But then there is this massive refugee crisis, millions of refugees, thousands dying a month, vaguely reminiscent of when all the Vikings, Muslims, Magyar, Avars, wanted to grab a piece of Europe for free. They were able to stay in peace after they changed their ideology.

However, the Ninth Century was an apocalypse for the Renovated Roman citizens living in West Francia (pretty much today’s France, Benelux, and Western Germany. It got so bad, that the citizens lost all respect for the authorities.

The last overall Renovated Roman emperor, Holy Roman EmperorCharles the Fat, was reproached his inaction against the Viking: asked by We The People, to free Europe’s capital, Paris, from the Viking. Paris had been the de facto capital of Francia since the army there elected Julian The Apostate Augustus, in the Fourth Century.

Charles, great grandson of Charles I (Carlus Magnus, Charlemagne) chose to buy off the Vikings, instead of massacring them into submission (the proper course of action). As a result, the Vikings were right back. Again and again.

Charles III actually paid the Vikings to attack Burgundy (then in revolt). He subsequently failed to deal with revolts in Swabia, Saxony, Thuringia, Franconia, and Bavaria. The nobles of the Empire deposed Charles the Fat in 887, and he died two months later in 888. He was the last single head of the united Renovated Roman Empire (decomposing West Francia went her own way).

An anti-Viking superhero, who fought in the frontlines, close and personal, Odo, Count of Paris, nominally succeeded the deposed Charles III as king of West Francia (Neustria, Austrasia, etc.). I say nominally, because, locally, people have had enough of global governance. Imagine Brexit to the power six (2^6 = 64…)

Ultimately, as I said, a combination of military force and force of civilization, would make the Vikings submit (they got to stay in the places they had so well depopulated).

However the population of West Francia had lost all respect for the capacity of imperial authorities to protect them. Local power was seen the best protector of We The People. West Francia (the western two-thirds of present day France, and the Benelux) exploded into 60 different states (the same number of states which Julius Caesar had found there, a millennium earlier!).

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IT LOOKS AS IF MACRON LEARNED DEEP LESSONS FROM EUROPEAN HISTORY:

Emmanuel Macron, the latest elected French king, is going around, speaking eloquently of a “Europe which protects”. Ah, yes. High time. It’s not 888 CE anymore?

So what to do now? The Barbarians are at the gates, and breaching through. Europe paid the Muslim potentate, the Sultan Erdogan, billions, to keep the Barbarians away and out. The Roman empire used exactly the same method for decades, before it failed spectacularly. It had only made the Barbarians more barbaric and more demanding, and more powerful.

The way to handle the Barbarians is to go out, and destroy whatever makes them so barbaric. When Rome had its terminal refugee crisis, from too many Goths at the gates, Christianized Rome was welcoming, and thus found itself at war on its own territory. Instead, Rome should have projected force outside, and help the Germans, and Scythians, outside, against the Huns.

Right after his election, king Macron went to Mali, a country twice the size of France, where France wages war against the Barbarians. And now the king has gone there again. Good. This is the way to do it. Project force. China was doing best when projecting force outside, it’s not just a European thing. As China found out, not projecting force can result in having can result in a situation where the whim of one man could have annihilated the entire Chinese population, the entire Chinese civilization, language, everything Chinese.

However Genghis Khan was intelligent enough to have a high opinion of civilization. He brushed off the proposal of his generals to exterminate China, turn it into a steppe.

Wage war outside, exterminate the Barbarians. Let the ignorant call that “colonialism”. History knows better, they don’t.

Very few Americans don’t believe in a God, or Life Force, Spirits and other Superstition (according to many polls, one of them reproduced below). I of course believe that all those who believe in superstition or divination are victims of a lack of introspection, resulting in a regrettable submission of (their) perception to domination. This the foundation of their political subjugation. It’s also the royal road to subjugation. Thus countries friendly to superstition and the religions attached to it, are typically submissive to mighty plutocracies.

And thus, as we see inequality rising around the world, it can be tracked to the imposition of the American “neoliberal” model, a modern ideology to impose the grossest traditional plutocracy! Only 2% of North Americans do not believe in the supernatural: a god, life-force, spirits. This means that most North Americans are superstitious. In comparison, 11% of South-East Asians do not believe, in a god, life force, or spirit. One could say South-east Asia is five times less superstitious…. In France, a whopping one-third of the population don’t believe in a god, life force, or spirit. Thus the French are less ready to believe that plutocrats are benevolent, philanthropic spirits, under a merciful god… (The Market?)

The cult of all things religious has been reinforced top down in the USA since 1954, date of enthronement of “In God We Trust” (which displaced the Republican “E Pluribus Unum”).

For example, Americans are taught to venerate Pastor Martin Luther King. To esteem MLK is honorable, but his cult, at the exclusion of the cult of others, and not learning what exactly happened, arguably even more meritorious, is dubious. After all, President Eisenhower, an ex-general, and Earl Warren, head of the US Supreme Court, did the the heavy lift and courageous combat against segregation in the 1950s.

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Forget God and its “Pastors”: Presidents, Generals and Judges are who Order Progress:

Here is Earl Warren:

Segregation of white and colored children in public schools has a detrimental effect upon the colored children. The impact is greater when it has the sanction of the law, for the policy of separating the races is usually interpreted as denoting the inferiority of the Negro group…Any language in contrary to this finding is rejected. We conclude that in the field of public education the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.

—Earl Warren, Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court

Much clearer than “I have a dream!”. To desegregate schools, Eisenhower sent the army. Conclusion: if you want to fight injustice, clear legal, republican thinking and the army, in other words, force, is what is needed.

This Is Why The French Revolution, Core to the United Nations’ Charter, Happened in France, and Not America!

MLK was made into a living god, a sort of Muslim-like “Messenger”. In truth he was part, and rather at the end, of a much more powerful wave he surfed on. Heroes may be useful, but the cult of the providential man prepares that of the “philanthropist” as plutocrats call themselves. (Just as in the Middle Ages plutocrats modestly called themselves, the “best”.)

Thus, when I criticize Islam, many Americans feel I defend the Bible (which is actually the source of Islam, something i know, but they don’t…)

The entire left of the world, not just the USA, suffers from searching for heroes, rather than clear thinking on the Republic. But this is precisely what the plutocratically owned media and the masters of public opinion, wanted. It’s the result of meta teaching, inculcating impotent forms of thought.

I should speak only to the French agnostics (but they don’t generally read English well enough to understand me, as a French professional philosopher once told me, thus he asked me to translate my thoughts in… French; a full-time job I couldn’t possibly do. Actually, I have no time to write a book. As Socrates implicitly pointed out, thinking per se is a full-time job… Socrates, going overboard, famously called writing “the semblance of truth”; that would make all of math, physics and now biology the “semblance of truth”… Although I do agree for Plato…)

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Cult Of God, One & Only, Came From the Hydraulic Dictatorship Zone:

Verily, much of the roots civilization we use today appeared in what I call the Middle Earth (earliest writing is from there; although it was completely independently evolved in Mesoamerica). Egyptian civilization appeared 6,000 years ago, and the first city known in Anatolia, a few millennia before that.

However, the Middle East, central to the Middle Earth, suffered desiccation of the land, and then the minds, as it veered into . Thus it is natural that this physically sick region came up with a sick metaphysics. It is also of some import: it’s no coincidence that the Roman empire collapsed when Christianism was imposed to it, and countries such as Syria collapsed when Islamism was imposed to it (in the Seventh Century already!)

Some have noticed an analogy between “Ra” as in the theology of Egypt, AbRAhamism, and BRAhamism. This is not as ludicrous as it sounds. First, Abrahamism clearly arose in Egypt (as the Bible recognizes sneakily). Secondly Brahamanism, which gave rise to Hinduism, Jainism, Buddhism itself came from the old Vedic religion, which, in turn, comes from the Middle East. Wikipedia says:

According to Anthony: “Many of the qualities of Indo-Iranian god of might/victory, Verethraghna, were transferred to the adopted god Indra, who became the central deity of the developing Old Indic culture. Indra was the subject of 250 hymns, a quarter of the Rig Veda. He was associated more than any other deity with Soma, a stimulant drug (perhaps derived from Ephedra) probably borrowed from the BMAC religion. His rise to prominence was a peculiar trait of the Old Indic speakers.[27]”

The oldest inscriptions in Old Indic, the language of the Rig Veda, are found not in northwestern India and Pakistan, but in northern Syria, the location of the Mitanni kingdom.[40] The Mitanni kings took Old Indic throne names, and Old Indic technical terms were used for horse-riding and chariot-driving.[40] The Old Indic term r’ta, meaning “cosmic order and truth”, the central concept of the Rig Veda, was also employed in the Mitanni kingdom.[40] Old Indic gods, including Indra, were also known in the Mitanni kingdom.[41][42][43]

The preceding illustrates well the concept of the Middle Earth. It also means that 72% of the world’s population derives its metaphysics from Egypt, or thereabout). More or less (the Egyptian empire often encroached deep on the so-called Fertile Crescent, which is anchored in the West by Israel, Lebanon, Syria…

Ultimately, Egypt, soon after a remarkable attempt at monotheism (which promptly spawned Abrahamism), decayed. Why? Some will point at the invasion of the “Peoples of the Sea”, which Egypt, alone among the Great Powers, was able to defeat (at considerable cost).

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Egypt’s Government Model Was So Obsolete, Its Civilization Became Senile:

However, shortly after, Egypt exhibited a lack of animal spirits and was durably overrun by Libyans, and then Assyrians, Persians… Tellingly, it’s the very fierce Greeks and their uncouth students, the Macedonians, who freed Egypt.

What happened to Egypt? Long drawn out dictatorship, when the rise of new technology called for start-ups, basically Greece was full of startups. Startup city states…

True, Egypt got invaded by vast empires, modernized versions of itself. When the Persians came around and colonized Egypt, so they did because Achaemenid Persia was a multinational empire, ultramodern in many ways.

However, ultimately the tiny Athenian startup defeated Persia at Marathon, and then insolently landed an army to free Egypt (its mental benefactor) from Persia!

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Puritanism Does Not The Best Minds Make, Deep Thinking Is Dirty:

Last week I went out with a number of friends of the Anglo-Saxon persuasion, aggravated by reactive vegetarian ethics. I was retrospectively surprised by the lack of animal spirits. How can one have artful, constructive mental intercourse without the blossoming of passion? It certainly can’t happen when all conversations are guarded. After all, that’s why the divinity was imposed: the divinity imposed a subdued mentality, a submissive morality, and, definitively, a lack of inquiry.

Thus it’s no accident that the French, long at the forefront of the battle of ideas against the obscurity of stupor, are the ones most aware that all past superstition is just that, superstition without foundation, as reckoned by its own definition.

And these are not words without foundation: in the Twelfth century, Pierre Abelard reinvented Classical logic (and went further). In the Fourteenth century, another Parisian, Jean buridan (Johannes Buridanus), went even further with the Cretan Paradox (rendered famous by Kurt Godel). Buridan also invented the hard part of Newton’s laws (three century before Newton). Actually Buridan anticipated not just Newton, but also Riemann’s force theory (used by Einstein and Al. in the Theory of Gravitation aka “General Relativity”!)

Both Abelard and Buridan were involved in colossal struggles, fights to death, with the catholic Church. Buridan had refused to enter the faculty of theology, so that he would not have to take an oath to the god of Abraham. Abelard fought Saint Bernard to death. Saint Bernard was then the most important, and most fanatical Catholic. At the time, it looked as if Saint Bernard sort of won. But history showed he lost. Buridan’s work were outlawed by the church, under the penalty of death, except in far eastern Europe, where they were taught to the young Copernicus.

During the period 1100 CE to 1700 CE, Christianism caused an unending succession of terror, major wars, crusades, holocausts and massacres throughout Europe, and from there, the world. How come Europe didn’t collapsed as Rome did? First Europe was governed mostly by a plutocracy which was severely related and intermarried. They killed the poor a lot, themselves, much less. And actually that plutocracy was firmly in command, in secular command.

For example a fanatical Catholic such as Saint Louis put his mother, Blanche de Castille, ex-ruling queen, in charge several times as he made war through the Middle East (and letting himself be made a prisoner by the one and only female ruler that Islam ever had, in Egypt!). So he let a woman in charge, but he also had organized a modern justice system, now copied everywhere, including the USA.

Rome collapsed, because emperor Theodosius, around 390 CE unleashed the office of “Inquisitor” he had just created, against the “Heretics” (“those who made a choice”). Inquisitor, heretics: two terms, dripping with blood and terror, bathing in fire, imposed by Roman Catholic emperor Theodosius. By 400 CE, the empire was collapsing so much that the bishops put the Franks in charge of three provinces.

The Franks were Pagans

Hopefully, they still are!

And will stay that way! Maybe Americans could join their forefathers the Franks, and realize that, if they want paradise, they can get it only on Earth. Let me rephrase this a bit: If one wants paradise, one has to work hard, because one can get it only on Earth! It means in particular that on eschews the seductions of the rule of hell (plutocracy), and better start with free universal healthcare, as those who believe it’s their task to create and make a really Good God!

There is colossal anti-West propaganda going on. I will give a striking example here: asinine graphics from no less than “The Economist” (I had noticed it when it came out, but now it has gone viral). Propaganda is not just made of systems of ideas, but systems of moods. For example, racism or ‘esclavagisme’ are certainly moods. So is nationalism. The mood that civilization, in its present form, did not blossom in Europe, is just counter-factual… And as we will see below, insane, serpentine, base and villainous. And self-serving to a malevolent elite.

Anti-Western propaganda is also anti-civilizational propaganda. Many will disagree with this; because they have been thoroughly molded by anti-Western propaganda. But actually, it is pretty clear: the United Nations charter is the French Declaration Des Droits, written large… (The various US “Bills” and “Independence Declaration” or “Constitution” are not far removed.)

Who would have interest to undermine Western ideology, also as known as civilization? Those who want to undermine correct civilization. The one and only. And replace it by plutocracy (evil boosted oligarchy).

So what did The Economist do? It published these cute, authoritatively spoken of, yet viciously lying graphics:

Just restricting Europe to “Italy” means nothing. For most of the history of the place presently known as “Italy”, “Italy” did not exist. Here is the real situation before Charlemagne conquered Eastern Europe (including the Avars in Hungary).

Europe 800 CE, Before the Franks Conquered Eastern Europe. The Franks reconquered Britannia in 1066 CE, giving birth to the present polity there. (Yes, they called themselves “Franks” or “Europeans”.)

The description given by The Economist incredibly shrinks Europe, by comparing provinces of Europe, with giant multinational, multireligious empires. “The Economist’s” brain-molding will work only for those who know nothing of the history of the Indian subcontinent, nothing of the history of “China” and nothing of the history of Europe. Comparing two empires, India and China, with portions of the European world and its colonies is both stupid and biased, to the extreme.

So the entire idea of The Economist’s graphs (‘China back on top!’) is silly: It is little more than comparison of demographics. And wrong demographics: implicitly identifying “Italy” as its own power in 1 CE is exhibiting a total ignorance of Roman history and politics (the Gallic tribe of the Senones had captured, centuries earlier, Northern Italy, and defeated Rome; in 1 AD, Gallia Transalpina, North Italy, was still administratively, part of Gaul).

If one wants Western GDP in 1 CE, one has to look at the entire Roman Empire, and add Britannia and Germania. That would make for the world’s largest GDP (Rome had already 25% of the world’s population, then, more than 60 millions, and the richest areas, like Syria (!); East Asian populations would explode later, from new rice cultivars producing two harvests a year).

In the West, the (legal, political, civilizational, linguistic, imperial, spiritual!) successor of Rome was Francia (“Imperium Francorum”). It was synchronous with Tang China, and comparable in population, extent and GDP (Tang controlled a gigantic desert far west of not much import on GDP). Tang was a high point of Chinese civilization complete with empresses (like Francia!) and printed paper money.

So why not consider just GDP within the Central China Plain, if one wants to compare with portions of Europe?

China, to this day, is made, officially, of one hundred ethnicities (several times more than Europe). China was rarely united in the last 4,000 years. When Genghis Khan’s army invaded “China”, “China” was actually made of several empires with different languages and religions.

Ditto with India (many parts of India were independent nation-states with their own languages, alphabets, religions, for most of their history).

That Europe is shrinking, there is no doubt. As soon as Europe finally orders Apple Inc., the world’s largest market cap company, to pay more than 1% tax, Washington screams, and then right away retaliate by ordering Deutsche Bank to pay 14 billion dollars in fine. What does Europe do? Bleat. Even the anti-Euro Stiglitz admits that we are dealing here with a “fraud”. “Frauds” like that undermine Europe, by undermining the tax base of countries such as France, hence the French or British military and defense financing, hence system, thus all what’s left of European defense, and so on. (In the next step, naturally enough, Europe makes humiliating treaties with the Turkish Sultan, as Europe does not have the military will, let alone the military strength to go re-establish order in neighboring Syria!… and leaves the Russian and American empires in control, free to extend the mess ad nauseam).

In “Charlemagne”, The Economist pontificates that: “Unshrinking the continent: Europeans see themselves as mouse-sized. They need to man up…output in 11 EU countries has yet to recover to 2007 levels. Large economies, like France and particularly Italy, are struggling. The IMF has downgraded its forecasts for the euro zone, warning of the risks posed by Brexit. Unemployment remains over 10%, twice the American rate. And there is precious little thinking about long-term challenges like ageing, infrastructure or education. ”

Why would one to “man up”, when one is told one was always insignificant, wrong, colonialist, exploitative, cruel and degenerate? Did not insignificance and all these other wrongs work pretty well? In the fullness of time?

In truth, Europe spread civilization by the sword, and then the gun (against all sorts of established plutocrats, often, not always, to put in place neo-plutocrats). Field guns were developed by southern French to win the “100” Hundred Year War against Northern France and England… A bit earlier, the Mongols used rockets rather than guns. Later the giant “Ottoman” guns which fell the walls of Constantinople were actually made by hungarian engineers…

Civilization without guns, that’s called pasta.

Implicitly, “The Economist” concludes the same:”Hormones Needed”. Yes, well, hormones, the right hormones, come from the right moods. And that comes, in turn, from a correct version of history. The right moods come only from a correct version of history, in the individual, as much as in a civilization.

***

Why So Much Hatred Against The West, In The West? Why So much hatred Against Civilization?

The bottom line is that civilization has always been victim of a chronic disease, plutocracy. Plutocracies rest on ideologies, including self-serving religions (Islamism and Christianism are examples).

The adversary of plutocracy is, always, the optimal civilization (OK, sometimes it is not easy to imagine how a civilization like that of the Aztecs could have quit the man-eating habit, considering the context).

What is this optimal civilization? The one closest to human ethology writ large: liberty, equality, fraternity. At a given technological level, in a given ecology there is pretty much just one. Those who hate civilization, In other words those who aspire to rule over others, using whichever ideology comes in handy, the plutocrats. This is generally how plutocrats come to power. Chains control rebellious bodies. Erroneous ideas and misleading moods control minds, eschewing the potential for rebellion altogether.

An example; the first two presidents of the USA, in the Eighteenth Century, signed a document, the first international treaty of the USA, stating that “the USA has nothing to do in any sense with the Christian religion”. Perfect. And the motto of the USA was “E Pluribus Unum” (“Out of the many, One”, a verbal version of the Roman and French Republic fascist principle). However, in 1954, apparently inspired by the Nazi SS, the US Congress replaced it with “In God We Trust”. That was a perfect mood to accompany the USA’s superficially pro-Islamist policy (pro-Wahhabist, pro-oil, pro-Saudi, anti-French, anti-British, pro-Shiite, anti-democratic Iran, etc.).

Telling us constantly that European civilization was weak trash, throughout history is self-serving propaganda on the part of those who hold (most of) the media, the plutocrats. They want We The People to be weak. So they persuade We The People that it was always weak. We have seen all before, when the Roman Republic, and, later, the Greco-Roman empire imploded. The best of the Greco-Romans, the Neo-Platonists, were told, again and again, that they were enemies of God. And often submitted to abuse, and sent to torture, or death (see Hypatia).

We don’t need to see it again. The world seems at peace now, as it seemed to be in May 1914. However, and differently from 1914, a huge catastrophe, the greatest in 65 million years, is gathering steam. That could heat up the situation quickly, in all sorts of unexpected ways: cornered, overcrowded rats tend to become very aggressive. And not just rats. When a situation gets tense, war hormones go up, and small provocations can lead to irreversible combat.

“We empowered a demagogue” laments the New York Times ostensibly bleeding heart liberal, the kind Mr. Kristof, in his false “Mea Culpa” editorial, “My Shared Shame: How The Media Made Trump”. By this, Mr. Kristof means that Mr. Trump is a bad person. However, Mr. Kristof’s choice of the word “demagogue” is revealing. (Actually it’s not really his choice: “demagogue” is not Mr. Kristof’s invention: he just repeats like a parrot the most prominent slogan of the worldwide campaign of insults against Trump).

Trump a demagogue? Is Mr. Sanders a “demagogue”, too? (As much of the financial and right-wing press has it: for The Economist and the Financial Times, Trump and Sanders are both “demagogues” and that’s their main flaw.)

To understand fully the word “demagogue” one has to understand a bit of Greek, and a bigger bit of Greek history.

The Hellenistic Kingdom Mood, And Aristotle, Had A Devastating Influence On Rome, Thus On Western Civilization, Thus Us, Ever Since

What does demos mean? And what does agogos mean? Both words are Greek. Agogos means “leader”, Demos means “people”. In ancient Greek “demagogos” meant “leader of the People”. A demagogue was viewed as bad in the Hellenistic Kingdoms period, because kinship was good, and We The People was bad. We inherited 2,000 years of dictatorship from the Hellenistic Kingdoms’ mood.

The latter point is the key: thanks to Aristotle’s devastating influence, monarchies and tyrannies became the ideal political regimes (for the next 2,000 years). I explained the whole thing in “Aristotle Destroyed Democracy”. Aristotle was the senior, most respected figure, of an impressive number of mass criminals who were his personal friends, students and followers: Alexander the Great, Antipater, Craterus, etc.

The practical result was that the entire Greek world became subjected to monarchies and tyrannies. With the sole exception of Massilia (modern Marseilles) whose small empire stayed democratic and independent (in spite of being at war with no less than Carthage based in Barcelona!) Marseilles would fall only after Julius Caesar besieged it (in one of Julius’ particularly ridiculous exploits). But the fact only Massilia stayed democratic tells volumes (OK, when Greece, attempted to go back to democracy, plutocratizing Rome crushed it, culminating with the devastation of Corinth in 146 BCE).

So the deeper question is this: since when has “leader of the People” become a crime in the US? Was president FDR a “demagogue”? What is the president of the USA supposed to be? What is the problem? Is the president supposed NOT to be a “leader”? Or to NOT be a leader of the “People”?

Is the President of the US supposed to be a follower? Of whom? The plutocrats? Is the president of the USA supposed to take Air Force One every few weeks, to get money from the Silicon Valley plutocrats, and ask them for instructions?

The ascent of Trump is precisely tied to the opinion that the office of the President of the USA is not anymore that of the leader of the people. Instead the president has become the leader of the 1%, exclusively. Thus, the more one complains that Trump is a “demagogue”, the more one presents him as precisely what the country, and maybe even the world, needs: somebody who wants to lead We The People, not just the 1%.

[Mr. Kristof allowed a shortened version of this comment to be published… After sitting on it for 12 hours. Delayed publication is akin to censorship, as the comment was published in 777th position instead of being among the first. So Mr. Kristof is not as kind and open as he wants to depict himself.]

A hard day may be coming for global plutocrats ruling as they do thanks to their globalization tricks. And I am not exactly naive. Andy Grove, founder of Intel, shared the general opinion that much of globalization was just theft & destitution fostering an ominous future (the Hungarian immigrant to the USA who was one of the founders of Intel). He pointed out, an essay he wrote in 2010 that Silicon Valley was squandering its competitive edge in innovation by neglecting strong job growth in the United States.

Mr. Grove observed that: …”it was cheaper and thus more profitable for companies to hire workers and build factories in Asia than in the United States. But… lower Asian costs masked the high price of offshoring as measured by lost jobs and lost expertise. Silicon Valley misjudged the severity of those losses, he wrote, because of a “misplaced faith in the power of start-ups to create U.S. jobs.”

Silicon Valley makes its money from start-ups. However, that phase of a business is different from the scale-up phase, when technology goes from prototypes to mass production. Both phases are important. Only scale-up is an engine for mass job growth — and scale-up is vanishing in the United States (especially with jobs connected to Silicon Valley). “Without scaling,” Mr. Grove wrote, “we don’t just lose jobs — we lose our hold on new technologies” and “ultimately damage our capacity to innovate…

The underlying problem isn’t simply lower Asian costs. It’s our own misplaced faith in the power of startups to create U.S. jobs. Americans love the idea of the guys in the garage inventing something that changes the world. New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman recently encapsulated this view in a piece called “Start-Ups, Not Bailouts.” His argument: Let tired old companies that do commodity manufacturing die if they have to. If Washington really wants to create jobs, he wrote, it should back startups.

Friedman is wrong. Startups are a wonderful thing, but they cannot by themselves increase tech employment.”

However, American-based manufacturing is not on the agenda of Silicon Valley or the political agenda of the United States. Venture capitalists actually told me it was obsolete (before stepping in their private jets). That omission, according to Mr. Grove, is a result of another “unquestioned truism”: “that the free market is the best of all economic systems — the freer the better.” To Mr. Grove, or Mr. Trump, or yours truly, that belief is flawed.

Andy Grove: “Scaling used to work well in Silicon Valley. Entrepreneurs came up with an invention. Investors gave them money to build their business. If the founders and their investors were lucky, the company grew and had an initial public offering, which brought in money that financed further growth.”

The triumph of free-market principles over planned economies in the 20th century, Mr. Grove said, did not make those principles infallible or immutable. There was room for improvement, he argued, for what he called “job-centric” economics and politics. In a job-centric system, job creation would be the nation’s No. 1 objective, with the government setting priorities and arraying the forces necessary to achieve the goal, and with businesses operating not only in their immediate profit interest but also in the interests of “employees, and employees yet to be hired.”

As even the New York Times now admits, the situation has degenerated since 2010. Although the employment rate halved, in a slave state, everybody is employed. But neither the economy, nor the society, let alone progress and civilization are doing better.

“Insecure, low-paying, part-time and dead-end jobs are prevalent. On the campaign trail, large groups of Americans are motivated and manipulated on the basis of real and perceived social and economic inequities.

Conditions have worsened in other ways. In 2010, one of the arguments against Mr. Grove’s critique was that exporting jobs did not matter as long as much of the corporate profits stayed in the United States. But just as American companies have bolstered their profits by exporting jobs,many now do so byshifting profits overseas throughtax-avoidance maneuvers.

The result is a high-profit, low-prosperity nation. “All of us in business,” Mr. Grove wrote, “have a responsibility to maintain the industrial base on which we depend and the society whose adaptability — and stability — we may have taken for granted.” Silicon Valley and much of corporate America have yet to live up to that principle.”

So the argument counter-Grove was that plutocracy was OK, as long as it was all American (an argument Trump long disagreed with, BTW). But, clearly, it’s not the case anymore. Instead the US government has become the back-up to global plutocratic corporations (watch Obama flying to Argentina to encourage the new US pawn there, just elected… after making economic war against left leaning Argentinian governments ever since Argentina refused to take orders: the first beneficiary are New York vulture funds).

Sanders, the other “demagogue” just defeated Clinton (the establishment insider plutocrat) in three states out of the US mainstream: Washington State, Hawai’i and Alaska (with 3/4 of the votes). Interestingly, and differently from all the other past or present primary contenders, Clinton is implicated in several inquiries from the FBI, Department of Justice, etc. At least she is not terrorized like Maria Carey, who cancelled her concerts in Belgium (other singers did not).

Mr. Grove: “… the imperative for change is real and the choice is simple. If we want to remain a leading economy, we change on our own, or change will continue to be forced upon us.” Trump and Sanders say nothing else.

Yesterday, a dove penetrated inside my house, flew around, collided a bit with something, and then exited the window with precision, before perching on a eucalyptus branch, looking at me dazzlingly. I have seen it many times before, but generally it stays outside. Last night, I dreamed of seeing a pigeon fly at an angle into a wall. I asked it why it did that, so deliberately. It replied: “Did you see the state of the biosphere?” I suggested a more constructive actions. And it’s how it is going to happen: at some point, all the biosphere we depend upon will revolt (and after Zika, we have now Lassa fever, which is very close to Ebola).

Our corruption is not just an economic and social problem, a political problem, and a civilizational problem, as it was under Aristotle. It is a problem for the entire planet.

“We empowered a demagogue“, laments Mr. Kristof. His true calling, and that of the Main Stream Media, was to empower plutocrats, and their obsequious servants. How sad they are.

Abstract: The refugees from Syria have to be let in. Simultaneously, the root of the problem has to be dealt with. And it can only be dealt with war, a war which is, first of all, to be fought on philosophical ground.

Most countries ignored the refugees in the 1930s. So doing, those countries not only condemned millions of innocents to death, they failed to learn about, and prepare the war with, the ideology of death, which was on a collision course with civilization.

***

A father, his wife and two sons, aged 3 and 5, fled war in Kobane. Kobane, a city in Kurdish Syria, was destroyed by strict followers of the Islamist ideology. Relative of these Kurds had made it to Canada, a gigantic expanse of rich, temperate land up north. The two little boys ended drowned, and so did their 27 year old mother.

Enough. Time To Eradicate The Cause

Chancellor Merkel and president Hollande had talked before about obligatory quotas of acceptation of refugees among European nations. Now they are making a formal proposition. The Hungarian PM, Orban, objected that accepting all these refugees would destroy the “Christian identity” of Europe. However, millions of Christians are trying to flee the Islamists (so one cannot accused these to not be “Christians”).

The war refugees reached the Anatolian coast, 23 kilometers away from the European island of Kos, in Greece. Canada had refused them peaceful admission (they had family there). So the war refugees had to flee for their lives, in an “unlawful” manner (how can it be “unlawful” to save one’s family?) They boarded a small boat at night, manned by a local Turk. The sea was bad. Two nasty waves, and panic on board, threw the family in the sea. Only the father survived. Aylan, three years old, ended on a beach, face down, drowned to death. Here he is, in the picture above. But cameramen were there.

In the present crisis, Germany has been the most accepting country of all for war refugees. That’s quite wise in many ways, and a significative change from German atavism. In 2015, Germany will admit 800,000 refugees, from the Middle East, much more than any European country.

In the long run, if the refugees are well integrated, they should help the German economy, which is short in workers. (That’s an important “if”; it passes by destroying first Islamist ideology, fundamental version.)

Daech (“Islamist State”) bought, sold women and young Yazidi girls calling them “cattle”. A trick women and girls used was not to wash, and smell as bad as possible, “Sara” testified in a book just published “Ils Nous Traitaient Comme Des Betes” (“they treated us as beasts”). Yazidis follow a religion several times older than Islam. So Islam hates them: as Yazidis are not “people of the book“, but “idolaters“, according to the Qur’an, they have to be killed. Hey, don’t look at me funny, just be respectful, and go read the Qur’an. Culture is nurture.).

Not that this is all about Daech: the horrendous dictatorship in Syria, that of the scion Bachar El Assad, has killed at this point around 250,000 people, displaced eight millions, and kills at a rate seven times that of Daech (according to the Syrian Human Right Watch (UK)).

When millions flee, leaving behind how they lived, risking their lives, it is an unmistakable symptom of evil rising.

On the face of it, the Islamist ideology, fundamental version, is worse than whatever was written in “Mein Kampf”. In Hitler’s book, one has to read between the lines, between the lies, and extrapolate. In the Qur’an, no need to read in between, or extrapolate anything: all sorts of categories of people, including highly speculative and non-objective ones, such as “apostates”, are condemned to all sorts of horrible death (with a preference for burning alive).

And now is Islam, fundamental version, in action: more than four million refugees, in Syria alone (OK, the dictator, Assad Junior, is officially not an Islamist, but he has the Islamist mentality, by opposition to the democratic mentality, and he is losing the war to the Islamists, whom he had craftily, or so he thought, released himself from jail!)

Yes, Islamism, like Nazism, was manipulated by an even greater force, international plutocracy gravitating around the highly leveraged banking system. But that makes the rising of war even more ominous, as it means that its causes are very deep, they have two stratigraphic layers, completely different in nature. One a form of banditry turned into a religion, the other, in the West, even worse, a form of banditry which nobody is aware of, a sort of transparency of crime.

So let’s accept the refugees from Syria, millions of them. That will be wonderful for European demography. At the same time, that can only be done by cracking down on the Islamist ideology. All and any preacher of Islam sent from overseas ought to be sent to jail for a very long time, and all and any Islamist teaching fundamentalist Islam should also do a long and hard time. This is the philosophical part: treat fundamental Islamism just like Nazism is treated in France and Germany: a criminal thought system.

At the same time, let’s not forget that, when million of refugees flee, it’s just a tripwire for infamy rising. And infamy needs to be crushed (said Voltaire).

In the 1930s, millions of Jews, and opponents of fascism, tried to flee central and southern Europe, where fascism had, using force, taken power in Italy, Germany, Spain, Hungary, etc… The USA was singularly uncooperative in helping them, accepting only a few celebrity refugees such as Einstein, Enrico Fermi (soon to direct the Manhattan project), Marlene Dietrich, etc. Cruise ships were turned around, and sent back to the Nazi Reich, and all passengers were grabbed back by the Nazis, and annihilated.

Meanwhile, France, with a territory smaller than Texas, accepted hundreds of thousands of refugees. (Compare with the 1,800 refugees from the Middle East the USA plans to admit in 2015.)

The usual “explanation” for the USA’s inhuman policy relative to the Jews and other enemies of Nazism in the 1930s, is that the USA is that the USA was “isolationist”. Sorry if I let you die along the road, or drown in the sea without throwing you a buoy, I’m isolationist.

In France, “non-assistance to person in danger” has long been a crime, very prominent in the law. A law, as applied to individuals, changes the mood of an entire society. Much difference between the USA & France comes precisely from the effect that this law, or lack thereof, has on the average person’s mind. (From health care, to incarceration madness, to fracking, etc.)

However, the more likely explanation was not “isolationism”. Instead, it is quite the opposite. The USA authorities, entangled with USA plutocracy, which was itself deeply entangled with European fascisms (in particular, Stalin’s Reich), was anxious to not have the American people guess the truth. The USA’s deep state knew the truth, and it suited it just fine: Europe was rotting, with a little help from the plutocracy of the USA, to the world’s worst dictators (Stalin, Mussolini, Stalin, Franco, Ho Chi Minh, etc.).

The solution, of course, as history revealed, was not to just accept the refugees from Nazism, but to go to war, something that the French Republic had understood first, yet could only do, once the United Kingdom had aligned itself behind France (this happened after the fall of Spain in winter 1939).

Eternal Return of the Same? Police officer talks to a Jewish person outside the kosher grocery where Amedy Coulibaly killed four people earlier in a terror attack, in Paris, Tuesday, Jan. 20, 2015.

[For those who want to know, Judaism is the oldest religion practiced today in France. By a few centuries.]

The situation is the same now: first the refugees have to be accepted, now, and massively. But, although Europe can gladly accept maybe ten or twenty million refugees (as long as they get cleansed from lethal ideologies such as Islamism), Europe cannot accept all of Africa and the Middle East. Africa and the Middle East need to be fixed.

So what to do? War. And imposing an ideology that will overwhelm Islam (it has been done before, say with Christianism, or, in most of these places, in the… 1930s: then Islam was viewed as the Middle Ages, ignored and despised. In the 1930s, Egyptian women in bikini crowed the beaches. Not coincidentally that was before the Nazi inspired, and Nazi allied, Muslim Brotherhood was created! One could argue the Muslim Brotherhood ought to be made illegal, for the exact same reason as the related Nazism is illegal… Yes, I know, some will argue Nazism is legal in the USA; yet, not really: one can hang a Nazi flag, and that’s OK, yet, one cannot indulge in ANY Nazi act: those are called “hate crimes” and are illegal, in the USA, France, Germany, etc.),

In other words, it’s high time to re-establish and expand over much of Africa and the Middle East, the Greco-Roman empire Muhammad had explicitly planned to destroy (and made an excellent job of it). What goes around, comes around.

A fundamental aside: “Greco-Roman” is a mislabel. The “Greco-Roman” empire was Greek and Roman in language, but local languages flourished too. Moreover, the empire was also British, German, Punic, Spanish, Syrian, Libyan, North African, Illyrian, even Arab, etc. Not that the Sassanid (Iranian) empire next door was not another mighty civilization.

Some will scoff that this vision is too violent, too primitive. However, violence, that is force, works, and the more hinged on basic instincts, the more it works. This is why plutocracy, and its related tools, Nazism, Islamism, Sovietism, Maoism, etc. tend to work (only plutocracy and Maoism are thriving, at this point, but the others had their time of domination). The force, and seduction, of Islam is mostly in its primitive force.

Houellebecq published his book called “Submission” (that is, Islam). Coincidentally with the Charlie-Hebdo attack. Now the Algerian writer Boualem Sansal is publishing “2084, La Fin Du Monde”, also about the takeover of the world by Islam. Houellebecq just stated that he would now have written a version of his “Submission” much more critical of Islam.

Sansal talking to Haaretz: “I identify with all those who fight for freedom, and I believe that overall freedom is meaningless unless each of us is free. Those who are enslaved to a murderous ideology like radical Islam, who are presumably fighting for the freedom of the nation, are not coherent. They want to liberate their people in order to enslave them.”

Sansal writes in French, a language mostly derived from Latin, the language spoken in Algeria 2,000 years ago. Sansal wants French to be the official language of Algeria (instead it’s the language of the genocidal invaders, Arabic, which has been adopted as official language rather than of the three pre-existing languages… which still exist! Kabyle has not yet been made an official language.)

Daech, the Islamist State, knows, as Muhammad and his successors knew, that the facts which matter most are military facts. Indeed Islam rests on only two battles. In one of these battles, the small (40,000 men) Arab army annihilated the much larger Persian field army. In the other battle, the same Arab army defeated the enormous Roman field army. In both cases the Arabs were quick to follow their victories with unprecedented massacres (to eradicate any possible resistance).

So accept the refugees: it’s the human thing to do. But prepare to eradicate the cause of the exodus. That, too, is the human thing to do. And also the wisest.

To be more human is to be intelligent enough to use the greater force. Not just an opinion. A fact. A striking fact of human evolution.

Humanity is a force which goes, ever stronger. And morality is how it’s managed.

Germany is behaving correctly, wisely by accepting 800,000 war refugees this year. But that is unsustainable, and that is not enough (the USA is accepting maybe 1,800; yes, less than two thousands).

The German Republic needs to go where Merkel did not dare to go in Mali and Libya: support militarily, massively, the French Republic, reconstituting what made the Frankish Empire into Western Civilization properly reborn in a sustainable way. And the French need to project more force at the root. However not as Obama has been doing with his war of the drones. This is a philosophical war, not a war of assassinations. Assassinations-as-policy makes it worse.

Yes it means military budgets in Europe have to shoot up. In pertticular the German one.

The unwillingness of Europe, the richest continent, to use force to re-establish a modicum of security, order and civilization in Africa and the Middle East, is entangled with its unwillingness to use force to re-establish a modicum of security, order and civilization all over, when the future is threatened, from any cause.

In Eritrea, the dictator there has been filling up the boats in Libya fleeing for Europe. Meanwhile, he lives very well from a payment system he set up for himself among the Eritrean diaspora. This has been going on for ten years. Clearly, the Eritrean dictator ought to be removed by force, because only force will work.

Fundamentally, the cause of these wars sprouting all over, is the lack of vision in the definition of civilization in the West. Both Houellebecq and Sansal have been saying this recently, and so I have, from my obscure corner. As Salman Rushdie just added, the greatest thinkers on the Internet are Justin Bieber and Kim Kardashian, and that can only leave deep thinkers with a feeling of madness and discouragement. The presidents probably consult with them, and they proudly wear the Legion of Honor (if not already, pretty soon).

Those little children drowned on beaches are there, because it’s Kim Kardashian desire which rules the minds in the West. And the more horrifying the reality, the more the Twitter generation follows Kim Kardashian’s buns obsessively.

As long as people confuse thinking and spiritual masturbation, what passes for smarts will keep on degenerating. This has moral, even military, consequences. And so it will, until war drowns everything. Yet, don’t assume the good, smarter, better equipped, and more powerful armies of civilization, always win: just ask the French generals on May 20, 1940…

Or then contemplate what happened in Syria, at the battle of Yarmouk, from August 15th, to August 20th, 636. That’s when the main Roman field army, four times larger and better trained and equipped, was annihilated by the Arab army. Why? How? Just because the Romans had been overconfident, and then impatient. Next, as a forerunner of the Islamist State they were going to establish, the Arab warriors scoured quickly all over Syria and adjoining regions to kill all and any male in age of bearing arms.

Yes, we have seen it all before. And the Romans came to believe it, only when it was too late. A century later, thrice in a row, three enormous Arab field armies would be annihilated in France (721 CE-748 CE). And then, defenseless from the annihilation of its armed forces, the Arab Caliphate in Damascus fell, never to be seen again. There is hope, but it better be clever and strong.

Force, ladies and gentlemen, there is nothing like it, and it starts with the civilized mind. And, first, to establish it.

Civilization is like a living organism, it’s even a living creature which has to be created again continuously.

Consider a few examples:

“Monetary policy is a serious issue. We should discuss this in secret, in the Eurogroup,” Jean-Claude Juncker, then chief of the Eurogroup, said at a Brussels conference on economic governance in 2011.

Indeed. Juncker allowed some of the largest plutocratic institutions in the world to escape taxes, in the order of trillions of dollars. He is, morally, a criminal, one of the most prominent. Thus, he is in charge.

Mr. Dijsselbloem replaced Mr. Junk. He is sour. He has a problem with the Greeks.

Westerners Came From The Orient

Or, more exactly, the Middle Earth. On top, in orange, the Steppe Origin of English, 6500 years old. On bottom, the Anatolian origin, older by 2,500 years. In an intermediate theory, Anatolian roots went up to the steppe, first. This sounds more natural, because the first cities came from Anatolia. Agriculture followed an even more southern route, through Crete and other Greek islands. In any case, (white man) language then went down to India.

That guy, Kok, became Prime Minister of the Netherlands, and later, after stepping down in 2002, became one of the most importantly rewarded politicians in the European Union, getting onto countless boards of “private” companies, such as Royal Dutch Shell, the ING bank, the privatized TNT-Post, etc.

Professional politicians ought to be outlawed, just like professional slave traders have been. And for the same reasons.

Civilization needs to be defended. Against the atavistic impulsion of the few to kill and abuse the many.

The CEO of HSBC, a bank suspected by authorities to finance hard drug networks and Al Qaeda, among other unsavory activities, is 55 years old. In 2003, 12 years ago, this remarkable creature got a secret bonus, worth ten million dollars or so. The bonus was so secret that nobody at the present HSBC knew about it. The money was in Singapore (did I need to say so?)

As Mr Junck above said, financial conspiracies are best conducted in secret. Only thus are they highly profitable. All the so called “Dark Pool” money passes through numbered accounts, diamonds, drugs, weapon and terror… to get cleaned and untraceable. HSBC Switzerland had 1,500 secret Saudi accounts.

As the Libyan dictator charged with his entire tank army into rebel Benghazi, after proclaiming all rebels would be kill to the last, the French Republic was right to destroy it. Civilization has to be saved, and this starts with destroying the enemies of civilization and humanity. However, after some French troops helped in the taking of Tripoli, the West got cold feet, and then unwisely left Lybia to its own instruments.

The situation in Libya was not going to be simple.

The West had a duty to send ground troops and help set-up a highly federalized society, where the oldest civilization could thrive again. Several part of vast Libya are vastly pre-Islamist, and even pre-Hellenistic.

But Libya is part of the roots of the West: Roman emperors’ families came from there. So Libya, and these roots, have to saved, just because they remind us of, and preserve, the reasons that helped bring us where we are. So they explain us, and embody our principles.

Some of the people who are the direct descendants of one of the oldest civilization fight for that, and their 3,200 year old Tifinagh alphabet. They need help. We did not give it to them. In no small reason because we obey force.

After he caged the FNL (Algerian Front National de Liberation) leader, (then French president) De Gaulle went to negotiate with him. Why? Not because Ben Bella was right and carrying the torch of civilization. No. Just because Ben Bella was strong. Being the leader of a terrorist group.

De Gaulle thought he could make Ben Bella an offer he could not refuse, gangster to gangster. (‘I give you Algeria, and also the Sahara with the oil, and the people therein who hate your guts, in exchange you give me UN votes.’) It was favorable to Ben Bella and the FNL, but De Gaulle just wanted to cleanse France from the non-French Algerians (I withdrew momentarily the appropriate epithets).

This is no way to build civilization.

At some point, it used to be fashionable, in the USA, to accuse some (typically French) intellectuals of “Orientalism”. (Those behind the fashion could be tracked to oil interests, of course.)

However, “Orient” was the notion used even before the rise of Rome… In fear of the future rise of something in Occident: as agriculture migrated West, with the rains, people in the Middle East could guess that the next superpower would be in the West (the sacred prophecies were kept in Republican Rome, as the most sacred book).

We are all from the Orient, and recent genetic studies have show just this: as agriculture migrated west, so did the farmers, through the Aegean islands such as Crete (the first publications on the genetics of this appeared in 2014, although the overall theory is much older).

The New York Times has this long article on the origin of English, the “Tangled Roots of English”, admitting finally that some cherished notions of linguistic are silly. Well, the silliness goes further than that: French (Germanized, abstracted and simplified Latin) and English (greatly a Franco-Normand invention), have about 80% words in common.

So the tree of linguistics is wrong. It’s not a tree. Just as with genetics, it’s more a network than a tree.

And it’s of course the same with civilization: a network, not a tree, and one, with many roots, not many, with no roots.

We come from everywhere, thus everywhere is our business. There is no civilization but civilization, and entanglement is its nature.

Abstract: Geography can dominate history. Examples abound. Civilization cannot just clash: it has to be defended by the sword, and by ideas which are even sharper than steel. Unfortunately plutocracy hate to see force, physical and intellectual, in command of We the People. This betrayal from class interest is how top civilizations go down: when plutocracy gnaws into civilization as the gangrene it is. The death blow is then given by the savages who are sure to come circling like hyenas. The latter is a symptom of the former.

Such hyenas brought down the Roman and Chinese state. Lest we be careful now, the Union of Savages and Thugs, with big titles, like president of Syria, or Russia, or the “Caliphate”, will engulf civilization. Let’s crush them when we still can (the “Caliphate” is only 20,000 strong, so could be literally exterminated, at this point). But we will crush them better if we also extinguish our plutocratic form of government.

Not Conquering Germania Magna Was The Proximal Cause Of Rome’s Failure

THE TEUTOBURG FOREST DISASTER:

The plutocratized Roman republic (aka “Principate”) suffered a psychologically shattering defeat at the Teutoburg Forest in 12 CE (just left of the G in Germania above).

Rome, as a real republic and democracy, had suffered much worse, even terrifying, defeats. However it was then, being a direct democracy, of a much stronger, much clearer frame of mind, and it rebounded with astounding efficiency.

Instead the Teutoburg defeat marked and accelerated an irreversible decay, as the Roman polity was taken in a pincer between exterior enemies and interior plutocrats. An army led by “princes” is much less effective than an army by the people, for the people… As the conquest of Germany required.

Some will object that the Franks, who conquered Germany after 507 CE, were led by kings. Right. But those kings were elected (more or less by the people). Nobody elected Augustus. Moreover, Frankish society was submitted to the equalitarian principle: the richest Frank was often elected king, but there was, or ought to be, no “nobilitas” notion among them; that point was made to the Pope around 740 CE by the son of Charles Martel, Pepin Le Bref.

Notice that the traitor (he had been a Roman officer) Arminius and his German army chose the location and time of the battle (which lasted three days). The miserable rain hindered the usage of Roman artillery; a swamp and a rise, the Kalkreise, prevented the maneuvering of the legions.

The treachery of it all (the legions were trekking back to their winter quarters) took Varus’ army was complete surprise.

GEOGRAPHY IS HISTORY:

The steppe which goes from Manchuria to Hungary allowed the Mongols to spill at least three times, in nine centuries, all the way to Central Europe (thus, having gathered immense power, they were able to build a giant empire, all the way to India, Japan and Indonesia).

Isolation from the Afro-Eurasian hyper continent, or, should I say, cesspool, meant that the Americas were not going to win the biological war between the former and the later. And so on.

I explained that a lot of the effervescent mentality which has festered around the place presently known as France has to do with the three giant trade routes between Southern and Northern Europe. The Alps and Carpathians, mighty mountain ranges, extend to the east over a thousand miles, blocking the way. Until the crisscrossing of wide rivers in the Ukraine-Russian plains. That, also blocked civilization’s penetration until the Vikings (“Rus”) used the waterways to enable profitable trade between Scandinavia and “Rome” (meaning Constantinople).

Nowadays, we are confronted to an old fashion modern Genghis Khan, Vladimir Putin, playing fast and loose, in a calculus where human lives are nothing. Putin has said a great number of things which should be taken literally: that Kazakhstan was not a state, that the Baltic countries had been a gift to the West, that the disappearance of the “Big Country” (USSR) was the “greatest tragedy of the Twentieth Century“, etc. His agenda is clearly to reconstitute the empire of the Czars at it maximal extent: he said as much, he will keep on coming for as much as he can get. This is not the “Cold War“. This is not a drill, either. This is war.

HISTORY AS A STAB IN THE BACK:

Scotland’s push towards independence from the London plutocracy is related to the struggle of Ukraine against the age old, vicious mentality in Moscow. That viciousness is how Moscow grew against, but also thanks to, the occupying Mongols (aka “Tartars”, or “Golden Horde”). Now that viciousness needs to be destroyed, as it is only compatible with a world war.

As facts of preceding centuries, even millennia, determine the flow of psycho-history, looking forward, it’s important to find out what those facts exactly were. In particular the exact history of the giant Greco-Roman republic-empire and its innovative successor, the “Imperium Francorum”-Renovated Roman Empire, is paramount.

Exactitude reveals that things could have turned completely differently, from small details: that’s known as the butterfly effect. From the flapping of a butterfly, a hurricane started (that’s probably impossible, for Quantum reasons, but let’s ignore that).

Out of the many penetrations by sharp objects which put an end to Julius Caesar’s life, only one was lethal, said his personal physician. Had Caesar survived, the history of Europe, and, probably, the world, would have been very different. Caesar had been on his way to a very ambitious military campaign which, knowing him, and his army, the best Rome ever had, may well have succeeded. The anticipated result was the extension of Rome over Persia, and all of Europe, west of the Caspian Sea.

THE MORE EXACT HISTORY, THE MORE FASCINATING:

Here is Eugen R Lowy, commenting on my site along these lines:

“The tragedy of Europe was caused by its two major rivers, the Rhine and the Danube. Since The Roman times it divided the Continent. Charlemagne was the first to unite Europe across the Rhine. Unfortunately it was not long lasting. The next one who would try to do it was Napoleon. But he was too eager to fight wars. Unfortunately at the time bungee jumping did not exist, that could potentially have pacified him.

The 20th century brought three unification experiences, the WWII of Hitler, then the Soviet- Stalin ( SS ) experiment, and the last one, the EU. Fortunately this one was the only successful one.

Let us hope that this time the [European] unification will thrive in spite of all those short sighted, petty minded but loud speakers.”

Eugen has it right, at least as far as the conclusion is concerned.

But the devil is in the details. Napoleon was tough: he charged at the head of his troops when his plan against the invading British was enacted at the siege of Toulon (1792), and was severely wounded in hand to hand combat. Later, as self proclaimed “emperor”, he took great risks, and had horses killed under him no less than 19 times.

Real history is often all too different, from what legends have it: the Romans were established across the Rhine, for centuries. As the Salian Franks were from one of the zones the Romans controlled (more or less), one could argue that they never left.

But, indeed, the (lack of) junction between Rhine and Danube was a huge military problem (especially as it extended the “Fulda Gap”: go ask Putin what it is, he knows!).

The Franks, three centuries before Charlemagne, had already united most of Franco-Germania, across the Rhine. What Charlemagne did was to mop up the last resistance in the most distant part of Germany, among the Saxons, and to push the frontier of Europe as far as (much of) the present European Union to the East. That made the European frontier short and defensible, stopping indeed Genghis Khan’s Mongols (the Central Asiatic invaders penetrated Poland, and Hungary, but collided there with united European forces, and, although they won in memorable battles, suffered unsustainable losses).

Calling WWII and Stalin “unifications” is farfetched: they were standard occupations and not the nicest. The situation with Napoleon was more complicated. Although he was a scum, he did not get the catastrophe started. Even greater scums, such as the pseudo-philosopher Burke, got the ball rolling.

WHY DID ROME NOT EXTEND MUCH INTO GERMANY?

The first Roman to cross into Germany was Caesar. He build a bridge across the Rhine, and went in to punish the Germans for having raided Gaul. He did this twice. However, the perpetrators tended to flee deep inside the immense forests.

Caesar thought about it, and rightly deduced it would never end. So he decided to catch the Germans from behind. A conspiracy of corrupt, idiotic plutocrats inside the Senate decided otherwise. 300 years later, the Goths were at the gates of Roma, the city of Rome herself (they finally conquered Roma another 160 years later).

Caesar’s grand-nephew and heir, Augustus, went back to the unimaginative method of the slow grind. The Roman penetration extended well beyond the Rhine, and even Danube. When three legions (18,000 elite legionaires, plus the supporting army) were annihilated by Arminius (“Herman”), they were going back to their winter quarters, and that trek back, along a narrow path, was in extreme Northern Germany, exactly were the hills met the immense swamp which preceded the North Sea. Over three days, in very bad weather, hindering Roman artillery, and a geography that prevented their maneuvering, the legions fought, until they met a final trap. Those survivors who had not escaped or committed suicide, were assassinated in human sacrifices.

So what happened after that?

Three things:

1) Augustus plunged into a nervous breakdown, losing his composure completely. He butted his head on the wall of the palace, begging general Varus to give him back his legions (Varus died at Teutoburg).

Against all common sense, Augustus counseled his successors to not try to control all of Germany. Yet, Germanicus (grand nephew Augustus, nephew and adoptive son Tiberius) knew better. He overruled the recommendation of Augustus to stay on the Rhine. Beyond the orders he got, he drove deep into Germany, with eight legions, and defeated Arminius for years. However, Germanicus was poisoned (by Sejanus; that was revealed only 15 years later, although widely suspected at the time, making Tiberius the object of hatred).

2) Increasing plutocracy in Rome meant ever less power for the army: that was evident by Marcus Aurelius’ reign (180 CE), when new German nations tried to break through the Danube towards Italia. Soon pieces of the army, starting with the Pretorian Guard, behaved increasingly like occupying and plundering bodies: this was the situation after the demise of the Severus dynasty (“Barrack emperors” period).

That enfeeblement, in turn, made the Germans ever bolder. By 250 CE, the Franks were raiding from ships, Viking style, throughout not just Gaul, but Spain and even North Africa, where they struck the populations by their appearance of blonde giants.

At the same time, the Goths commandeered a fleet of non-sea worthy ships, and rampaged for years all around the Euxine Sea (Black Sea), and even all the way down to Athens (which they plundered and burned).

3) Why were there so many Germans? Obviously agriculture in the North was getting more and more productive, allowing to support more and more people. At the same time, exposition to the Greco-Roman empire had partly changed, and militarized the German savages, and they yearned for civilization and the wealth of Rome. Spectacular victories over the Roman army inside the empire persuaded the Germans that the empire was richer, and weaker, than expected. The Persians deduced the same simultaneously, invading Mesopotamia and Armenia.

***

WE ARE ALL ROMANS NOW:

It’s nice to philosophize about the demise of the Greco-Roman fascist plutocracy known to itself as the republic. What is the morality of all this, looking forward? Two main things:

1) The strength of Rome was its republic, its direct democracy, before the lamentable Augustus tinkered with it to transform it in a military dictatorship. The real, original republic, was a direct democracy.

2) Vladimir Putin is much more dangerous than the Europeans realize. Not just because of himself, the quickly expanding forces at his command, and the will he has proclaimed to establish a much larger empire all over Eurasia (which he calls the “Eurasian Union”). But also because he demonstrates to the world that Europe is much richer, and much weaker, than it was thought to be. And it makes the entire world, including the Europeans, used to this idea.

Fortunately some in Europe understand this vaguely: the French sent to the Kurds very effective, easy to use armor piercing weapons, that were used very effectively by the Peshmerga. French military advisers are on the ground. The Americans, who were not exactly born yesterday, are in the lead this time (differently from the Saturday when Obama made an about face about bombing Assad, while French pilots cooked in their cockpits).

A question is what can the USA do to help rise the bellicose spirit of Europeans?

The answer is to advantage the French Republic and loudly cooperate with it, for all to see. When the Germans and other neutrals realize that France is getting rewarded because of her effective role in defending civilization, they may be keener in following suit.

There is also no way that France can play an important military role while being held back by the 3% deficit Eurozone spending rule (the USA turns around the deficit through Quantitative Easing, a stealth nationalization of much of the economy that does not augment the deficit, technically, while having the same effect, under another name, balancing the Fed’s books).

Ultimately, who decapitates whom at will, is what history is all about. Facts don’t have to be nice, they can just stand there, impervious.

It will be European Unification, under a superior philosophy, or it will be war, under superior barbarity: Putin knows this, and opted for the latter. That’s how professionally trained assassins tend to be.

One may ponder why it is that Augustus took the wrong turn. First he wanted peace and control. Second, he did not have a grand plan (as his reaction to the Teutoburg massacre showed).

Institutionally, Augustus decided little besides making Tiberius his heir (under (one of his wives) Livia’s influence). That was informal, and for many weeks which dragged by, after the Princeps’ death in 14 CE, nothing was done about the exact status of the Roman Republic: a nervous Tiberius, although the top general did not dare say he was taking command (“of the Senate”: Princeps), before he was begged to do so by an official delegation.

Some historians have suggested the obvious: the (informal) Roman Constitution was made for the City of Rome, not an empire with a fourth of humanity. The only way for the empire to go on was to militarize and dictatorize the Republic as much as necessary, as Augustus did.

That’s not true. The empire actually morphed in a galaxy of local cities and provinces which were rather free. The central Roman administration was very efficient. However, when the central state could not pay for the armies, trouble ensued (and this was true by 150 BCE). The armies did public works, not just defense. Augustus did not fix the problem of paying for a Republican army, instead he instituted a moral decaying dictatorship.

That moral decay presided the fall of Rome is not just my opinion: emperor Decius, in the Third Century held it, and asked the Senate to re-establish the office of censor: Valerian got the job (Valerian became emperor later, and made history by becoming the first and only captured Roman emperor; he was rumored to have become the stool Sasanian emperor Shapur I used to mount his horse).

FREE AS A PEACEFUL BIRD:

On the positive side, the strength of Rome was local self-determination, and the ensuing peace: before the Goths rampaged in the central empire (Illyricum, the present Balkans, and Greece), the region had known three centuries of peace.

This is why letting local nations (Scotland, Catalonia, Ukraine, Georgia, Armenia, Kurdistan) being free is important: it was one of the ingredient of the Roman success. Notice also that the Franks duplicated that regionalization later. Yet, the Franks did the latter to excess: regionalization got so extreme, that it led to alienation, nationalism, and finally, war.

This is what the European construction wants to correct: a millennium, or more, of alienation. But it will not happen without weapons. Intellectual weapons, but also, against thugs such as Putin, real weapons.

Intellectual weapons are the most powerful: when Bush’s USA destroyed the Iraqi republic of Saddam Hussein, it fostered the sort of thugs that now reign there (the expression “Iraqi republic” is similar to the one, “republic”, that the Greco-Romans used to qualify the Greco-Roman state for centuries after Augustus). This was highly predictable for anyone with enough of a brain.

Republics work, but only when they can strike in their defense. Nowadays, whether know-nothing Americans, and half boiled Europeans realize it, the republic has no borders, it’s all over the planet.

It’s easy for Germany to be tired of the French deficit (4.4% predicted, whereas Germany is at 0%). Germany’s fate, and course correction, was determined by bombs, not deficit.

Work works, but, in the ultimate cases, war is irreplaceable.

Consider the invasion of China by the Mongols over 60 years. The Jin dynasty, Western Xia, the Dali Kingdom and the Southern Song (which fell in 1279 CE) worked hard, and were on the top of civilization (the Xia was the most powerful Buddhist state ever). Their successive defeats were not caused by lack of industry, but by lack of military skill caused by the asinine stupor a lazy plutocracy prefers in the People they subjugate (that observation was made by Mongol generals themselves, again and again).

That, in turn, was caused by the wrong ideas all over.

Wrong ideas are all over nowadays. Examples: the fact that children should be less educated in the West than in Shanghai; that the Qur’an is a book of peace; that international law does not apply to Moscow (or George Bush), and that’s not a civilization threatening event; that we are not at war with Putin; that there are (military) borders; that banks are not public utilities, that the fractional reserve system is not a subsidy to plutocrats; that Quantitative Easing is not communism for the wealthiest; that greed will solve everything; that Earth’s biosphere is not in the greatest crisis in 65 million years; that the parliamentary system in most of the West can be called “democracy”. And so on.

All these very erroneous ideas need to be beaten into shape.

Without getting the right axiomatic first, we won’t know where, or even why, to strike. This was the problem Rome had after Augustus. This is why most of Europe is supine, as threats add to injury. That’s why Obama admitted he had “no strategy” in Iraq and Syria.

That was, at least, honest. Let’s give him a hint: hit the enemy in Iraq and Syria, while extending peace feelers to the ex-supporters of Saddam Hussein’s regime (thus splitting the enemy). That’s the most moral thing to do.

Some brainiacs such as the philosopher Michel Serres (of “France decapitated”), make a big deal that France is a “Republic”, and the USA a “Democracy”. It’s the sort of mock sophisticated distinction that those who want to look intellectual embrace. Serres has taught in plutocratic universities of the USA, he should know better. Or, maybe, he knows better how to serve his masters than yours truly. The distinction is without merit.

First it blows up the differences between France and the USA. In truth, both Republics are much more similar to each other than they are, to any other regime in the world (including the United Kingdom).

Differently from Rome and Athens, the USA and France were born as entangled republics. Both Republics have recent imitators, namely dozens of modern states.

Second, the main difference between “Republic” and “Democracy”, as it happened 25 centuries ago, was just a matter of language and esthetics. The beauty of how the concept sounded in Greek did not translate in Latin (‘Populus-Imperium” has six syllables).

But democracy was not exclusively a Greek concept. It was as strong, if not stronger, in Rome.

Indeed, the “rule of the People” is how human societies have always worked best (except during war): distributed intelligence, creating the super-brain effect, from the many brains debating. The “Multibrain” effect. Whereas, indeed, I do not believe in the “Multiverse”, the human brain, and, even better, any human society, is a multiverse onto itself.

Democracy allows to tap in this multiverse of the multibrain. Democracy is a multiverse. For real.

So the Romans spoke Latin. They had two words for “power” in the sense of “rule”. “Potestas” for lower magistrates, “Imperium” for higher magistrates (Consuls, Proconsuls, Praetors; “Censors”, although higher magistrates, did not have the “Imperium”).

It would have been all too long, thus awkward to make a single word with “populus”, “potestas”, and “imperium”. Thus the romans instead used the Thing Public (Res Publica). Later the Demos-Kratos of the Greeks, Latinized into “democracia”, was used.

But that does not mean the Romans did not practice democracy. They did. Real democracy, that is, direct democracy. In practice, there was little difference between direct democracy as practiced in Athens, and that practiced in Rome.

(But for the fact that Athenian democracy lasted two centuries, and the Roman one, around five. Also, even under the Principate founded by Augustus, many Republican functions kept on going, and it was not clear that the Republic had stopped, as the weird transition between Augustus and Tiberius amply demonstrated.)

The various Roman “Magistrates” were masters of diverse functions, and represented those functions. They implemented People Power, they did not displace it. They did not represent people, just functions.

Rome, or at least the Roman Republic, which lasted five centuries, ignored that oxymoron, “Representative Democracy”.SPQR, the Senate and People of Rome, lasted so long, precisely because the Romans refused to be represented in some theater, by professional liars. (For those who don’t know, oxymoron is Greek for “sharply stupid”.)

Athens’ democracy failed, because, as Demosthenes pointed out, the Greek city-states refused to make the tremendous war that was required to get rid of the fascist plutocrats from Macedonia. In the end the war came to them, and Antipater, one of Philippe’s senior generals, took Greece over thanks to enough torture and execution to terrorize the Greeks into submission (130 years later, the Roman Republic freed Greece, and the legions were then withdrawn).

If it was so good, why did Rome quit Direct Democracy?

I have argued that it was because of the rise of plutocracy. That’s entirely correct, but then the question occurs of what allowed this rise.

I have written detailed essays pointing the finger at the Second Punic War, the rise of the war profiteers, the death, or dilution of the really noble Patrician families’ spirit (whose ancestors had conducted the Roman Revolution in the Sixth Century BCE). I also pointed out to the fact that the Roman Republic became, thanks to that war, around 200 BCE, a global power.

All too many rich, powerful families were then able to do what is now called “inversion”. Namely rule from abroad (where Roman Law did not apply). So they escaped confiscating taxation that was meant, precisely, to decapitate the plutocratic effect.

But there was another pernicious effect of the vastness of the Roman Imperium.

Athens had met it already. In the Athenian Assembly (of the People), important decisions needed a high quorum. That meant distant farmers had to travel to Athens for a few days. That was expensive, so the Athenian Republic paid for distant farmers to come to vote.

The situation was much worse in Rome.

The Athenian City-States ruled Attica, which is about 100 kilometers long. The Athenian Imperium extended at some point to the Black Sea (to insure the wehat supply). Moreover, all Athenain dependencies could be quickly reached by boat.

Not so with Rome. Cities such as Numance (Numentia) sat in the middle of Northern Spain, weeks of travel from the sea.

Rome was physically incapable of maintaining communications fast enough to maintain direct democracy (in any case the old democratic set-up in Rome depended of the detailed status of citizens within “tribes”, and would have had to be severely modified just to extend to Italia).

Very slow communications was the deep down root killer of Roman direct democracy.

We don’t have this excuse. Not anymore.

Quite the opposite. Whereas Rome experienced a loss of opportunity as the empire extended, modern technology, the Internet, offers us the ability to do as the Romans did under the Republic: vote all the time, about anything.

We don’t need no stinking representatives. Freedom is a mouse click away.

“Share and share alike… America should also embrace the OECD’s efforts, already backed by more than 50 countries, to create a truly multilateral system in which tax information on residents’ accounts and certain investments is shared annually. For that to work, America would need to hand over data similar to those which it demands from others—something it has hitherto appeared reluctant to do. The financial superpower looks ever more a regulatory bully, setting rules it ignores itself.”

Bullies Kill, Vultures Feed, Justice The Old Fashion Way

Setting rules for others one ignores for oneself is the essence of viciousness.

“The financial superpower looks ever more a regulatory bully?”

The USA is a financial bully, and it started in 1944, when the USA tried to bully Lord Keynes himself (head of the currency commission at Bretton-Woods), into accepting the Dollar of the USA as the world’s reserve currency.

The fact that it started so long ago means that the bully’s institutions have evolved accordingly. A particular case if American justice, which finds American violence to be just: the case of the vulture funds is exemplary. Whoever stands in the way of American vultures is unjust.

Keynes wanted to use the International Monetary Fund to create “Drawing Rights” as needed, a solution Dominique Strauss-Kahn implemented to the tune of 450 billion dollars until his fateful encounter with the maid from hell, taken super seriously by New York “Justice” (until she proposed so many tricks to the officers in charge of “protecting” her, that, well, it was embarrassing, even for New York “Justice”).

Keynes resisted totally, so the government of the USA forged the documents that made the USA into the one and only financial superpower. When Saddam Hussein begged to differ, and started to use Euros, he was hanged. So the BNP executives, who have not been executed yet, ought not to complain too much, as The Economist astutely points out, somewhere else.

What is The Economist alluding to above? “…hand over data similar to those which it demands from others.” To the fact that the USA is the world’s largest tax haven for global plutocrats, while busy destroying all other tax havens. The destruction of Swiss banks and bankers is exemplary that way.

In other words, the USA sucks up capital from all over the world, by stealing other countries’ taxes (as it provides plutocrats, worldwide, to escape taxation, thanks to… Delaware).

Says The Economist in: “Tax havens, The missing $20 trillion How to stop companies and people dodging tax, in Delaware as well as Grand Cayman”: a lower rate on a broader base, combined with vigilance by the tax authorities, would be more efficient and would probably raise more revenue: America, whose companies face one of the rich world’s highest corporate-tax rates on their worldwide income, also has some of the most energetic tax-avoiders.

These reforms would not be easy. Governments that try to lower corporate tax rates will be accused of caving in to blackmailing capitalists. Financial centres and incorporation hubs, from the City of London to Delaware, will fight any attempt to tighten their rules. BUT IF POLITICIANS REALLY WANT TO TAX THE MISSING $20 TRILLION, THAT’S WHERE THEY SHOULD START.”

From the horse’s mouth: to tax the missing $20 trillion, start from London to Delaware… Exactly what I have been saying for years. The global financial exploitative mess is part of an Anglo-American imperial situation.

I have condemned the way “judicial” authorities in New York siding with the financial vultures therein. The Economist now agrees with me, and goes somewhat further, as it alleges state corruption. Here is an extensive extract from:

BNP argues that it broke no European laws… That is true enough, to Europe’s shame… It is also true that the underlying transactions had nothing to do with America, but because they were denominated in dollars they had to be cleared in New York, which provided America’s lawmen with a toehold.

But the guilt of a suspect and the justice of a cause do not make a tribunal fair. And America’s system for pursuing errant banks, especially foreign ones, is anything but fair… BNP had little choice but to settle. Defeat in court might have led to the loss of its American banking licence—a death sentence for a big international bank. America’s prosecutors can also wield the threat of criminal charges against individual bankers.

Bank against the wall

Not only were BNP’s tormentors, such as Benjamin Lawsky, New York’s politically ambitious banking regulator, able more or less to dictate their terms, they also had an incentive to make the fine as big as possible because the agencies involved divvied up much of it among themselves. Mr Lawsky’s outfit gets $2 billion, four times its annual budget, which it will triumphantly deposit in New York state’s depleted coffers.

There are no meaningful checks on this process, let alone a plausible procedure for BNP to appeal. Bank bosses cannot even publicly criticise deals they agree to under extreme duress. No precedent is set and no guidance provided as to the limits of the law and the proportionality of the punishment.

So even if BNP fully deserves its punishment, the legal system that meted it out is closer to an extortion racket than justice. France’s economy minister, Arnaud Montebourg, has compared America’s pursuit of BNP to “economic warfare”. In other words, a bank that catered to mass murderers has had some success in portraying itself as a victim. Any process that can make BNP’s dealings with Sudan look anything less than shameful must be very flawed indeed.”

“Catered to mass murderers”? Is that not the story of the invasion of Iraq by the USA? Did BNP invade Sudan? Is the USA pursuing the invaders of Iraq?

No, the USA is using imperial might in ways very similar to Putin. (Putin also has laws and judges and Congress on his side, nota bene.)

Two months ago Argentina reached a settlement with the Paris Club, a group of government creditors.

On June 16th the Supreme Court of the United States decided twice in favor of NML Capital, a “vulture” fund (and subsidiary of hedge fund Elliott Management) that snatched dirt cheap bonds after Argentina’s 2001 default. The fund and its plutocratic owners have since pursued the country for the payment of all principal plus outstanding interest in US courts. For at least 1.6 billion dollars.

The ability of struggling countries to restructure their debts has been dented. Hold-outs everywhere have greater incentive to litigate; creditors who might accept exchange offers could see them gulped down by vultures, catered to by USA judges.

Those who play with fire to burn others may find where the concept of “backfiring” comes from.

Traditionally, there are those who are for empire, and those who are against it. Also there are those who distinguish good empires (the Athenian empire, the French “mission civilisatrice”; English Commonwealth) from the disgusting ones (say UK’s anti-Boer South Africa), to the very bad ones (plutocrat Leopold II’s Heart of Darkness Congo), or the outright demonic ones (the Kaiser’s holocaustic Namibia).

However, Manicheism goes only that far. I am going to suggest a completely different form of analysis, and approach, to the concept of empire.

An empire has subjects, just as a predator has preys. This is the conventional view. And, yet, it contains its own overcoming. Indeed, just as there is a mathematical entanglement between predator and prey, there is a philosophical entanglement between an empire and its subjects.

Good Empires Rest On Holy Wisdom; Ἁγία Σοφία, Constantinopolis

“Imperium” depicted initially the absolute, life-and-death ordering capability from top Roman generals. (Roman “emperors” inherited that capability, as they were always the commanders in chief, at least on paper.)

To this day, an empire is supposed to be all about a few ordering the many (thus, intrinsically “fascist”). Yet, even this Roman military root is endowed with subtlety: imperium does not reduce to fascism.

Why? The semiotics of fascism is, fundamentally, not just about the many being strong by tying up together. It’s about the law, and the law is absolute: Dura Lex, Sed Lex (Law Hard, But Law). So the many are tied by an absolute.

Roman generals were obeyed absolutely, only when they inspired an aura of absolutism, that only vertiginous respect could confer them.

A professional special force killer was sent to assassinate Marius (seven times Consul, who triumphed in Africa over Jugurtha, and Gaul, Piedmont over invading Germans). He found the elder Marius in a room. Marius, unafraid, addressed the would be-assassin with his stentorian voice: ”Soldier, are you going to kill your general?”. Trembling, excusing himself, the assassin fled, and Marius’ enemies gave up on the notion of killing their all too respected foe.

In other words, imperium worked best when the soldiers loved their generals. After all, soldiers were armed to the teeth, trained to kill, and not to fear death. Generals need to be loved, the law does not. So imperium is an intrinsically milder notion than fascism.

Thus it’s not enough to say there are good empires, and bad ones. More generally, there are good empire-subject entanglements, and bad, unjust ones. It’s not all about just about the empire, it’s also about the subjects, and it’s also about the interactions of the one, with the others. Moreover those entanglements can be asymmetric.

Let me give an example. The Roman empire was the ultimate empire. Arguably, it’s going on, stronger than ever, 27 centuries after its founding (long story). For at least a millennium, the Romans interacted with the Celts, Jews, Egyptians, Greeks and Mesopotamians.

It was the same Roman empire, however, the outcomes were very different, and drastic differences are reflected to this day: the West became Rome, and Mesopotamia is still wrecked by war without end. By far the most complex interaction was with the Celto-Germans. It was pretty much antipodal to what happened with the Jews and the Mesopotamians, and, one can even claim, with the Greeks.

In Mesopotamia, and against the Iranians, Rome and its successor regime (“Constantinople”) struggled in vain for seven centuries. Nothing came out of it, except so much morbidity that, in the end, the Arabs overwhelmed both Persia and most of Rome.

The Jews, or rather, domineering Jewish fanatics, who made no sense whatsoever, in two formidably suicidal wars, rejected Rome. The first of these killed a million Jews, much of the population of Israel, then. It started by the cold blooded killing, inside Jerusalem, of 600 legionnaires of the Roman garrison. The strategic objective was unclear, and soon at least three Jewish factions were fighting each other, to death besides engaging the Romans.

The Romans had a sense of humor, and catapulted thousands of pig heads inside Jerusalem (I presume that they let them rot carefully first). On the less amusing side, the legions devastated forests throughout the region to build gigantic works for the siege of the holy city.

Egypt did not care about Rome one way or another. That mood of pragmatic indifference was contagious: while the titanic struggle of the Judaic War unfolded, just over the horizon, the hundreds of thousands of Jews in Alexandria did not raise the smallest protest.

Greece had been severely mistreated by the plutocratic Roman Senate, by 146 CE: Corinth was destroyed as a warning that republican independence of Greek City-States will not be tolerated. That was mass terrorism, and it marked Greece for centuries to come, as intended. Greek democracy did not recover, until the EU chased out the pro-Washington dictatorship, 21 centuries later.

And then there were the Celts and the Germans. Those were not united, they relished their complicated world. They had adopted many traits of Greek civilization, even before the Romans showed up. Their metallurgy was second to none, and a major export to Rome. Ultimately, after 16 centuries of tragi-comedy, and all sorts of happenstance, the Celto-Germans became Rome (officially, in 800 CE).

It’s actually a curious thing: after a terrible war when Caesar intervened (Caesar was accused by some in the Senate and some historians, to have caused much of the problem), nothing anti-Roman ever happened again in Gallia. Even when the so called Gallic Empire ruled, later, it was not to reject Rome, but to improve it.

Differently from what had happened in Greece, the Romans did not rule Gaul through terror (although the war with Caesar had killed and enslaved millions, it had been a very complicated, messy affair, nothing like the cold blooded holocaust at Corinth) . Far from it. Even Latin was not imposed. In the Fifth Century the bishop of Lugdunum (= Lyon) preached in Celtic. Latin replaced Celtic completely, well after the legions were gone (that happened in 400 CE, a decision of Rome, taken when, for budgetary reasons, Rome put the Franks in charge of defending the two Germania and Gallia). Phasing out the three Celtic languages happened when the Franks, who came to rule Gaul completely in the early Sixth Century, completely gave up their own Low Countries German for Latin.

The Celto-Germano-Greco-Roman civilization became a symbiosis ruled by the Franks. Why a community of minds there, and not with Israel, or Mesopotamia? It’s obviously an explanation that involves many factors. The Celto-Germans and the Greco-Romans had a very long story, with fair intellectual trade, in both directions: by the time Caesar showed up, that intense trade was at least a millennium old. The Roman army was equipped with Celtic metal works for centuries.

Celts and Romans had important principles in common, like a quasi-religious dislike for kings, and, certainly, hatred of tyranny. This dislike was so strong that Armanius (Hermann) a once-Roman officer who treacherously annihilated Roman general Varus and his three legions (plus supporting troops, and fellow travellers), was later killed by fellow rebels for behaving, it was alleged, like a king.

Yet, as Rome became a fascist dictatorship, the Germans became more sympathetic to fascism, and kingship. Clovis, elected king of the Franks, his father, Roman imperator Childeric I, and his grandfather Merovius. Thus, Western Europe (or, at least, the elements if Western Europe which came to re-establish an empire) was pretty much evolving as one mental unit.

Such bliss of a common spirituality was not shared in the Middle East. The Jewish God symbolized tyranny made divine. Persians and Mesopotamians needed to kneel abjectly to all the plutocrats they could find. Lack of water had led the civilization of the Middle East to dictatorship. The hydraulic dictatorship (Fernand Braudel) implied “Oriental Despotism” (Karl Marx). Fascism, cruel and demented, the “Right of Sword”.

Darius, who fought from Ethiopia to Ukraine, exhibited a clear case of the “Right of the Sword”. That existing mood was embraced 11 centuries later in the Qur’an. Unbelievably, the Sword is still festering today: arguing for the Right Of The Sword, Arab plutocrats are agitating, in 2014, to have Justinian’s Cathedral, Ἁγία Σοφία, “Holy Wisdom“,now a museum, been converted again to a mosque, so that the depiction of the real world represented therein be covered up again, as reality offends Islam.

This is an example of the persistence of moods and systems of ideas. Cynics will also point out that their genesis, namely the desert, only got worse.

Well, whatever: if we understand the situation, we can probably fix it. No empire, no law. Thus it remains to make the empire good.

Today the European Empire’s 28 heads of state approved Jean-Claude Junkers as head of the European Commission (the EU’s executive branch). The European Parliament is widely expected to elect Junkers next week. The 28 elected chiefs used the occasion to sign on the Free Trade and Association Treaty with Ukraine and Moldavia. Justly unsatisfied by this slap to Putin, they also sent Vlad the Impaler, back in Moscow, an ultimatum. Yes, an ultimatum. Electing the head of the EC is a furthering of democracy in the European empire. But democracy is naught, if it can’t bite.

The 28 EU leaders demanded that separatists return border checkpoints, release hostages and start talks to implement a peace plan drawn up by Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko by June 30. Failure to do so will result in “further significant restrictive measures” against Russia.

Vlad The Invader has three days to obey. It may be time for him to remember what happened when his preceding supporter of minorities through annexations, Adolf Hitler, refused to obey. Unbelievably, France persuaded Britain to declare war.